Emily Atef

Emily Atef studied acting when she was young, only to find out that it was not what she really wanted. But the experience was not for nothing: it was in the London theatre where she stayed for four and a half years that she discovered her real vocation, at which point she started to write short films. One day, following a tip from a friend, she applied for the DFFB Film Academy. This move would also allow her to reencounter her home town, Berlin, which she had left when she was just seven years old. “I watched films from morning to night“, she says. “That was almost the best element of film school“. At the DFFB she made good friends and met collaborators who went on to be by her side during the making of The Stranger in Me – such as producer Nicole Gerhards, co-writer Esther Bernstorff and cameraman Henner Besuch.

Before The Stranger in Me, Atef directed, during DFFB course, the short documentary XX to XY: Fighting to be Jake, focused on a British friend of hers who was born a woman but believed to be in the wrong body, as he considered himself to be a man. After that Atef went on to direct Molly’s Way, her first feature, which was also made with DFFB support. The film, a story of an Irish woman who arrives in a small coalmining town in Poland to find the father of her unborn child, made the director’s name known for the first time within the cinema industry.

Even though The Stranger in Me has a social side to it, this was not Atef’s first intention. “Esther (Bernstorff, co-writer) and I didn’t set out to make a political film. We wanted to make a portrait of a strong and stable woman who gives birth, feels nothing and falls into a deep hole”, she says. “She becomes a stranger to herself”. Researching for the film, Atef found out that 10 to 20% of all mothers suffer from post-natal depression and, shockingly, very few people know about this curable disease.

A fan of cinema-going herself, Atef believes that the idea of a perfect evening must include a trip to the movies. Asked which directors she admires in cinema nowadays, she points out the works of Carlos Reygadas, Bruno Dumont and Claire Denis. She is also interested in German filmmakers, such as Hans-Christian Schmidt, Andreas Dresden and Fatih Akin. “And, of course, the masters Bergman, Cassavetes, Kiarostami… and the list goes on…”

We are going to hear much more of her in the future, as she is right now developing her third feature, Kill Me, which puts together a 12-year-old girl who wants to die and a 43-year-old man running from prison. Atef defines it as “a road movie that goes through Germany, across the border to France, all the way to Marseille“. She was also invited to direct a film adaptation of the German novel Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier, which will be shot in France with a French cast. There are clearly no boundaries for Emily Atef’s cinema.

Joao Candido Zacharias